Hello! Welcome to the Theology Podcast, thank you for waiting. And that's actually directed at my co-host because I was late. Anyway, I'm here now and we can get started. I'm Sierra Weile, I'm a pastor and I'm a senior editor at Touchstone magazine. Okay, Tom, you. Tom Price, I teach theology and ethics at Gordon Conwell, theological seminary and I also serve a church in Connecticut. Okay, now over to Glen Sunshine, who for those of you who can see him has no hair on his head. The only hair showing for Glen is on his chin. So if you are listening to this on earphones and you don't have the pleasure of seeing the dome that now is shining beautifully, you can tune in on either Spotify or YouTube. Anyway, Glen. Yeah, I'm the Glen Sunshine. I have just had brain surgery done with ultrasound, which is why my head is shaved. Thank you for those of you who have prayed about that because in a previous show just before it was done. I requested that and I sincerely you do appreciate the prayers that were given there. About other things, I'm a senior fellow at the Colson Center for Christian World View and that brings up our guest today, Dr. Timothy Paget. Tim is the theologian in residence at the Colson Center and he's joining us today to talk about acumenism. How do we as evangelicals actually interact with people from other faith traditions? So welcome aboard Tim. Well, thank you so very much for having me on. I feel very comfortable with everyone has a good beard going on. I think Glen, of course, has the most magnificent one, but not there. Just a good chance to talk to some fellow beardos here. Yeah, my wife said I was looking rather mosaic at the moment. You're caught between you'll Brenner and Charlton Heston, they're glad. Terrell and Moses. Yeah, I'm like that. Anyway, Tim, the topic we decided on to talk with you about is is acumenism and how we can effectively work across the nominal or traditions within Christianity. So I guess the place to start off is to just ask about the Colson Center. How does it handle that? Well, it handles it pretty regularly. Whether or not we like to think we do it quite well, but it is a regular issue that we often deal with. I remember in my interview process, goodness coming on about eight and a half years ago now, I grew up in a reformed tradition, grew up PCA, I went to the PCA seminary, very Calvinistic, the whole Chabang. And in the interview process, I think it was Warren Smith asked me, he said, well, I see that you have your pedigree is very reformed, very consistently presbyterian stuff like that. How are you going to feel about interacting with people, other traditions, particularly whether it's, you know, people in the Methodist Wesleyan ended up things, or even on the Catholics and things like that. And my response was, well, I think we can avoid burning each other to the stake. And I think that's a good place to start. But it also points to the reality of the issue that while this is not the 17th century or the 16th century, those issues still do matter. I was a recall being in a class at Ted's at Trinity, Doug Swinney was teaching it. It was about evangelicalism. And he was noting that in, it was remarkable that just the people that were sitting around the table listening to the lecture, you had Lutherans, you had Anglicans, you had Baptists, you had E3, you had Presbyterians. If it had been in the 18th century, but maybe before the first awakening or something like that, it would have been hard for all of us to sit at the same table together. That would have been a very difficult thing. We were talking about that before we started recording, just the intensity of some of those things. And that is something that still affects us. Part of my job at the Colson Center is I handle the hate mail that comes in. Fortunately, not as much as I used to. Some of that gets filtered out now. Some very nice people helped filter that. But some people will complain about things that we write because we try to have a very broad view of things. Not a, not a, all truths or the same all roads lead to God kind of thing, but that we are going to embrace kind of a mere Christianity emphasis there. And so sometimes if we write about anything that intersects with say Roman Catholicism or we'll pop up the church fathers, we'll quote Augustine, we'll quote, and so we'll quote people throughout church history. And sometimes you'll have Roman Catholics right in to complain saying, well, you guys are Protestants, you know those guys are Catholics, right? Or you'll have Protestants right in and say, why are you quoting these Catholics? How can St. Augustine? How can a bishop be someone worth listening to? And they'll complain about that. And of course, I think that is probably someone who needs to read some Calvin and Luther to see how much they talk about St. Augustine. So that issue still, still something that afflicts us. And I try to kind of balance those things out in my responses. That is something that people deal with. I think people struggle with. There's a lot of Roman Catholics. There's a lot of Baptist, a lot of Presbyterians. To be a Catholic is to be a Christian, to be a Christian is to be a Catholic. And on mind of things, to be a Calvinist is to be a Christian is to be a Calvinist and so on. And they have a hard time seeing the breadth of it. The church is big and they don't all agree on everything. And I think that the unhealthy way to ecumenism is the, you know, all truths are the same. Kind of the, let's unite over, let's unite by discounting any sort of distinctness. And that's an unhealthy thing because that's saying truth doesn't matter. And I recall at a meeting for the Colson Center several years ago, there was a guy in staff who was Roman Catholic. And I said that, you know, I'm a Calvinist and he's a Catholic and we disagree on a lot. But we agree on the fact that there's something to disagree about. And I think that goes a long ways and Glenn, it was Roberto. The, by the way, Roberto Rivera, one of the most fascinating people you get ever meet. Absolutely. Yeah. You can talk about anything and will. But just a wonderful guy. But we had these things we disagreed about, but we had a place to agree on disagreeing. And I think that's kind of how you begin with the desinktives there. Well, you know, the Acton Institute, I don't know its current state, but under Father Serrico, there was a strong Roman Catholic contingent, a strong reformed contingent. And they worked together perfectly well because they both understood the differences and they both understood that the differences mattered. They didn't, they didn't say, well, you know, this, this is not really significant. The reason they were able to work together is they recognized the differences and they recognized the significance of it. Absolutely. I do, I do interestingly remember, you know, I'm old enough to remember the world in which that suspicion was still very large in a lot of the churches. I mean, I remember growing up in the Baptist church. And this suspicion really that anyone that wasn't Baptist really was wrong. I mean, that was usually first there. We're right. They're wrong, which is again, that's, there's not a complaint there being concerned about truth and that you're committed to it has, has integrity. But there was not much space for many others. The closest thing would be in those worlds, remembering back then, we're kind of revivalists and other kinds of very passionate, Bible-centered Christians, but really outside of that, to think, for example, that a Roman Catholic could really trust Jesus Christ or something else was looked at with a huge amount of suspicion in my own formation. I think one of the big changes was beginning to encounter through seminary and then of course, on more and more Christians, more broadly committed passionately to the historic faith and the gospel, although they slice certain things up differently and those were important things to emphasize. But really, even when I ended up, I went to duked a minute at a time when it was not what it has become now. And this was when Jeffrey Wainwright was a leading ecumenical theologian and his whole concern, along with most denominations, was modernism and liberalism entering into the historic expressions of faith. And the rigorous amount of work they did figures like Leslie Newbyggin, there were a lot of others in that world. But I think it was Tom Odin, in particular, who came out of a very radical left-wing Christianity that started to open the eye of the evangelical world, that if we're not going to have a foreign worldry like modernism defining the categories of how we read scripture and the faith, then we need to re-emerce ourselves in the historic faith, reading the fathers and the rest because all reformers said we're not starting a new church, we are carrying faithfully the one true faith. And that's where we really started to see that the real issue early on was how the Trinity and Incarnation were originally the doctrines on which the church stood or fell. And it was really from that context that you saw, I think, a lot of people begin to re-emerce themselves in retrieval theology that is now, I think, in a healthy way, bringing what was very modern in evangelicals back to a historic reflection. Yeah, I like to just make a couple of observations. Just one quick one, Tim, your Roman Catholic friend and you have far more uncommon than you have disagreements about. And I think that's one of the things that perhaps when a person lives in a very parochial setting, and I use the term parochial with the idea that that's usually what Catholics like to say, just for fun. But when people who maybe live in Virginia and the only experience they've ever had of Christianity is the Baptist church, a Baptist church, and then they find themselves thrust into a secular environment where they're actually rubbing shoulders with Hindus and Muslims and Buddhists and secularists and via Medaethias. And you come across a Catholic and you say, you know what? We have about 95% on the same page here. And you know, this is these little kind of internecine conflicts that we have, aren't those fun compared to the fact that there are some people over there that literally want to kill us. So that puts a lot of things in perspective. And I can't help but think that some of your writers, people who are writing into the Coleson Center with these kinds of complaints really do live in small worlds. And I say that with the full intention of insulting them. Yeah, the old great Baptist hymns of the faith like my hope is built on nothing less than scophials notes and scripture press. I mean, you know, you run into that every now and then. But, you know, okay, the pushback that we're going to get on this is what about satireology? Now, now I've said before on the show, I'm happy to work with anybody who'll sign on to nice scene Christianity and leave the, I'll even flex a little bit on that on occasion. You know, I'll work with with anybody within that up because I consider them brothers in the faith. But nice scene Christianity doesn't discuss satireology directly. Except in the person of Christ and in expressing who he is. So the objection from the evangelicals is yes, but the Catholics don't have the gospel. They are not teaching justification by faith. They rarely actually get that sophisticated in their language, but they're, you know, they're, you know, so how do you respond to that? Well, I think there's two levels of it. There's kind of the popular level of that sort of conversation where you've got some people who the people, as you said, in Virginia, I'm gesturing as up to where you are on my screen as though you can see that. It was in the same place. As you said, people in some narrow places, now that's narrow places, evangelicals, this narrow places are Roman Catholicism. I think that that sort of perocularism can be a very common thing. And I think that as fun as it is to, as you said, to kind of, you know, of poking insult people like that, so many of these people are wonderful people and they don't know. My father-in-law was one of the nicest persons I'd ever met. Very gracious. He gave me his daughter to Mary. So I'm really appreciative about that. But wonderful man went to the same Baptist church pretty much that all his ancestors, where he's buried now, sadly, past a few years ago. Same Baptist church his family has gone to for generations. I was going to a reform background again. I was going to go to Southeast and Baptist seminary to do some academic research. I wasn't going to be a student. I was going to the archives. And he said to me, once he was like, well, maybe you'll go there and you'll study it for a little bit and you'll become a Baptist. You get saved. I know. It just reminds me. It reminds me that when actually when my wife came to faith, we're both from the south and anyone who's been in the south for an extended period of time, you know, from the south you're a Christian, right? That's the end of it all. But when she came to faith in college, it was in a reformed context and they were worried that she'd join a cult because it wasn't Baptist. And I know we're knocking on the Baptist a little bit here, but I think that the Presbyterians can be that way too. A goodness. Cabe stage, there's a reason, there's a phrase, a Cabe stage, a Calvinist, particularly these young men who either they come to faith as such or they come to understand the doctrines of grace to a degree at least. They understand the gracious part of the doctrines of grace. And they, unless you are this very narrow little thing, I had an acquaintance many years ago. This is a back at the student was at Vanderbilt University at their RUF and they, he went to go visit and our median was giving us a give a talk. And he went out to afterwards and say, well, don't you understand that you could be a Calvinist if you just understand this one little point. As though this man had not considered that already. And so I think that we can get into that narrow thing. When we talk about there's that kind of narrow culture. I think if you think of certain, again, I lived in Chicago for about 10 years and you've got the Irish communities and the Italian communities for whom to be Italian is to be a Roman Catholic and vice versa. And it becomes so much a part of your identity. It's not a question of truth. And I think that that's again where that conversation between me and my friend Roberto mattered because it wasn't because his ancestor, his last name is Rivera and mine is Padgette, Spanish and English. That wasn't what we were disagreeing about. It was the objective truth that lay between us. And finding those areas, having the conversations about satiriology, about what is the church. I was, I've attended some of the meetings of the evangelicals and Catholics together. I'm just a kind of a observer status there and I get to nerd out a bit and listen to their great conversations. And in some of the things that conversations is pretty easy for them to come to some sort of parity. They talk about church state relations. The only time there was really an argument in that conversation, it was between two Roman Catholics because the issues church state wasn't really an issue that Protestant Catholics exactly disagree not now. I mean, you go back a few hundred years that what the view of the state and all that kind of stuff. But right now that's not a speeding point. At other points, they had another discussion about what is the church. That's a really hard thing for Protestant Catholics to come to to an agreement about. And it's a hard thing for Protestants to come to agree with that. Absolutely. Just like satiriology, I mean, I don't want to cut your thread, but I just wanted to say it before we move too far away from it. Yeah. Even evangelicals don't share in common. A lot of the doctrines they think they share in common between evangelical groups. They can be as divided or sometimes closer to what we would understand by semi-piligianism or all these different things they don't think they're a part of. So, you know, there's always that question. You don't think you have the difference until you get narrow enough to see where that difference matters. But if you pull back a little bit, doesn't look like it's a big difference at all. And then the wider you go. And Catholicism has different emphases too. The Augustinian Thomas are not the same as the two tiered Thomas. As they're not the same. They have traditions of reading those texts within the tradition that would look very much like a double predestinationary on one side or something else on the other. You can find the same in Orthodoxy. So, to think of it as kind of they all hold to this particular understanding and reading when it's much more complicated, I think these conferences, like you're mentioning, they help flesh that out. That it isn't so straightforward as people often think. Well, actually, as I mentioned before we get the recording here, if you go, when I go to the evangelical theological society conferences, a lot of fun, a lot of, you know, it's a thousand iterations of blue blazers, khaki pants and facial hair and lots of guys are building their denoure. And I was joking because all the people that I went to seminary with or went to grad school with will go out to dinner afterwards. And on one end of the table, you have the Lutherans and Anglicans and Presbyterians with their fermented beverages. And then you'll have the other end with the Baptist with their iced teas. And so, even those little things, those show up a lot. I think those distinctives matter. I mean, if you go, I as a reformed Christian, my view of the sacraments is going to have more in common with an Anglican than is going to have with most Baptists. But on the other hand, view of the church, the structure of the church, church officers, those are very different things. The difference between a Presbyterian and a Baptist on what is the church is arguably as significant as between Protestants and Catholics because what it's not for for Baptists is much more the individuals coming together. Whereas it's there's a corporateness much more in the Presbyterian sense or an Anglican sense that isn't present. So, I think yes, there's lots of diversity even within evangelicals. And actually, I have up above my head here. I haven't read it yet. Glenn says the movie is not good, but the book is in the name of the Rose. And what I loved about it in the movie, again, I'll go with Glenn's, yeah, don't watch the movie if anybody's listening. There's unfortunate scenes. They show the difference between the Franciscans and the Dominicans and stuff like that. That's within the Roman Catholic Church. They have their divisions. They call it different things, but those divisions are there. And you see that sometimes fracturedness within all branches of Christianity. I think this is an important point to not sort of just depart from too quickly because there's a kind of romanticism that some evangelicals have about, say orthodoxy or Catholicism, you know, they'll say, well, that's where I want to go because they're all together and on the same page, right? And they don't have the kinds of theological disagreements and diversity in those communities like we do. And it's just, I spent a lot of time trying to dissuade people when it comes to that particular matter. If you're going to convert Catholicism, don't do it for that reason. You're under a misunderstanding. You probably don't know many Catholics. You probably haven't had much experience with Catholicism broadly. Maybe you've got a couple of traditionalists that you've met. And they tell you things that maybe aren't actually the case. Ask them about the hippie like Jesuit with the guitar next time you're with them. And they'll fill you in on a whole different kind of liberal Catholicism that you just haven't heard about. One of the things that says, Lewis, you know, we brought up the term, mere Christianity before in connection with the Colson Center. One of the things that that Lewis says is that what he is describing in his book, we are Christianity, or the things that all Christians hold in common. Anybody who is worthy of the name Christian, they're going to hold all of these things in common. When it comes to satiriology, Lewis says it doesn't matter exactly how you understand Jesus is that saving us just so long as you know, Jesus is that saves us, you know. You know, so he's he's avoiding all those things. But he says, Christianity, mere Christianity is like a hall and there are a lot of rooms that come off of it. And it's important for you to pick a room because the room is where you're going to find your fireplace and your meals and your friends and someone. So you should you should land in one of those. You can change, but you should you should be aiming at a at a room, not just the hall. But he says, don't be too quick to judge people who pick other rooms. And while you can have arguments and discussions between people in those rooms, you know, in different rooms, don't do it in public. This is an in-house issue. This is not something that that needs to be broadcast for and wide. The important thing is to get people in the hall. You know, and then let them sort it out. And the thing that I find most discouraging is the degree to which, yeah, I don't know why they do this to me. On YouTube, I get all of these things where you get Roman Catholics saying, you know, you know, first climate is the the book that absolutely terrifies Protestants. Well, no, we're just in. You know, in all of these the Strideon Roman Catholic apologists aiming at Protestants or Orthodox aiming at Protestants. And it debris, somebody seems to be aiming at Protestants. But in view of what we're facing in the broader culture, why are you spending your apologetics efforts on that? It seems to me that there are much bigger dangers to the church in general than which particular flavor of Christianity you pick. I recall, I just don't get that. Yeah, several years ago, my father had been working for this one Christian publisher. And my father, he had both sci-fi and fantasy. And so he was the the acquisition of the acquisition guy. And they would he would send me the manuscripts to go to read through, which is great. I mean, they paid me 50 bucks to read through a book. Like, that's a lot of fun. But one of them was a very fascinating story, but it was a very thinly disguised parable about the dangerous Roman Catholicism. Basically conspiracy theory, it was said in the fantasy world. It wasn't like a real world situation. But the note I sent back to the publisher was like, you know, this, it's an interesting story and those issues about Roman Catholicism matter. But that's we have bigger fish to fry right now. That's that's not the main thing we need to worry about at the moment. And it's interesting because again, these different traditions sometimes have been been such that while in the one hand, you know, one group is, you know, calling the other one the anti-Christ and anathema. And let's be fair, they've we've they've all done it. We've all it's all been it's all there. But let's look at our kind of better dispositions. There's one group in the West that has been at the forefront of engaging in the protection of the created order, the emphasis on human nature, its full dignity, fighting first and foremost, probably before anyone else, the issue of abortion and what's going on in bioethics and what's going on in terms of euthanasia and pro life and and the like, which has been a lot of the tradition of traditionalist Catholics in their emphasis on the metaphysics of creation. And it wasn't until a figure like, especially in America that figures like Francis Schaeffer or something were saying, like, this is a wake up call, we're we're behind 15, 20 years. Who what was it about the theology that saw these things coming? And again, there are there have been Protestant figures into with technology, all you'll and other figures. But they were part of a conversation that was happening as as Europe was confronting modernism and scientism and technology and radical ways in the East you had it too with communism and the orthodoxy having the deal with it. And and and those a lot of those people had to be a little bit ahead of the game than the slow to catch up. Protestants in evangelicals. As a matter of fact, as we know, eugenics started if we're correct in the United States, 27 states being four and I see very little Protestant social teaching in those days coming out of the evangelical movement, addressing it. I'm not saying it didn't happen at all, but but really, guess who was observing how that that could get through in a in a country like the US and put it into implementation? I mean, I was Hitler. Guess where he learned it from. Protestant culture and Germany at that time was a distorted version of it as well. Yeah, well, it's worth noting that when abortion first became an issue of evangelicals were in favor of it, by and large, because they couldn't find a verse that said, that's not about your children. Right. Yeah, it's kind of hard for them to to find a kind of intuitive argument sort of a implicit argument. Right. Yeah, you see some of the language that in a lot of my academic research dealt with Christianity today and some of their stuff was at first, it was kind of broad and one of my big heroes is Carl Henry and at first his language is a little broad, but then they kind of it was one of those. I think it was an instance where it just hadn't dawned on them, the implications of it. As time went on, of course, the sevenies go on, I think that they had more time to think about what was going on. I think you had greater imaging technology that you could actually see that no, this is not merely a comp of cells, this is this is a human being. And as you mentioned, French shaffer, I think he absolutely is a Roman Catholics will cite him as a key figure and bring in the Protestants in along. As a kid, my father would tour around Middle Tennessee showing how should we then live and whatever happened to human race, all those videos around Middle Tennessee. And I think that that had a profound impact. And if you listen to the text with him in a saber coup, they are talking in a context of the, I mean, whatever human race is 79, something like that that's fairly late. They are talking at context of that they need to convince Protestants that this is not just a Catholic issue. And I think that that's something where a healthy, robust ecumenism could come really helpful, because that's an issue where Roman Catholics are relying while we can sometimes, we might quibble with the fact that they're relying simply because the Pope says so or the council says so. They're also relying on meditations on scripture, theological reflection on what it is to be human. And that is something that they have done a really good job about. Now, there are other times you hear Roman Catholic stuff. And I as a Protestant, and I don't know what I'm looking at. Shane Morrison, I've both become from a form tradition. He used to be at the Colson Center, he's now with Crossway. But we, everyone wants to all, we'll come across something others like, you know, we agree with the Catholics on this and so much. And then there'll be something other about they bless their stole by being at the relic of that and such. And I don't know what to do with that. And it's just a very confusing thing. And I think that's that's the tension. I think this is real because while there is so much on these kind of cobalidrancy issues, again, a shaper term used a lot, being cobalidrancy with all sorts of people, there's other issues where you just can't, I can't go that far. And if you're talking about cobalidrancy, I think that we as any sort of Christian should be very open to cobalidrancy. But that doesn't even get into the niceties of satiriality or, you know, the patron supremacy and who is Mary. We can cooperate with all sorts of people on issues that we agree on without it being a compromise. Part of my academic research was evangelicals and military stuff in the 20th century. And if you look at President Truman's attempt to kind of unite the country, all the religious groups against communism, his attempt didn't really do all that well. It kind of stumbled a little bit because he kind of tried to make this nebulous religious group. Eisenhower comes along. He's had a little bit more experience with some very diverse groups trying to get them to cooperate on a common project. Eisenhower comes along and he's able to pull it together a little bit better because he doesn't insist that they all come up with a statement of faith. They're cooperating a lot easier. And I think there's a good metaphor in that is because they're the distinctions of Roman Catholicism, the distinctions of Baptists, the distinctives of Eastern Orthodoxy. And they're not going to change. We're not, I as a reform guy, I'm not going to convince Roman Catholic to phrase all sorts of things, not let alone change their mind about lots of key doctrines and those doctrines matter. If we as Protestants are right about Mary, Roman Catholics have been doing something really wrong. If they are right about Mary, we have been doing something really wrong. That matters. But that's should, I don't think that could stop us from genuine cooperation in other fields. Well, yeah, we can extend that even further. If I remember right, Schaefer talked about taking the Mormons on his co-beligerence. Yeah, that in the abortion fight. Right. Actually today is very coincident today. It was February 17th. Colson Center, we put out a new, what would you say video? It's out on YouTube. You can go check it out. And I helped to write that one. And it's about our, our Mormons Christians. I forgot to answer what the exact title is, but Mormonism Christianity did the same thing. And we've gotten a lot of pushback from a couple of different angles. And not that video because we did one of our breakpoint things. That's our four minute video things we do. Go to breakpoint.org and you can see those. But the videos, this one is dealing with comparing and contrasting Mormonism Christianity. Mormons have pushed back on us on some of these things because they say, of course, we're Christians. It's right there in the name. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But you dig down in the details, it's something else. It really is something else. Yeah, you're dealing with, you're dealing with something that, you know, rejects core teachings of what all Christians subscribe to by any standard of measure of orthodoxy, which is summed up in our creeds. There's a reason why that language was decided upon, so carefully. And they definitely wouldn't. So whatever semblance of Christianity they hold to is, it's a parody in many ways of the genuine article. And what it does have and is committed to that does owe itself to the genuine article, you know, if they're for pro-life, from their own angle and emphasis, good. We would see them, they should put their voice out the pro-life. That is a genuine Christian valid moral stance, but they're grounding it indefinitely, a heretical teaching that we, that's where we couldn't have the same kind of cooperation that we could with someone who does confess the full Trinity, the full deity of Christ, the two naked these things. It's a very different sort of understanding. And I think that's the constructive element we can do with that. That, that to me is not ecumenism, that is cobaliturancy. And I think that like on trans issues, we can cooperate with Muslims. We can cooperate with lots of atheists who believe in the objectivity of the universe, like Richard Dawkins, has been great on some of these trans issues. And so his understandings of Christianity are obviously very different from ours, but I think that cobaliturancy element, we can have a lot of cooperation. Because I remember Christianity today, some of their early policies, they're an interesting issue right now, but their early policies back when Carl Henry was a editor, they would have just about anybody come in and talk, write an article, so long as they agreed about the subject that they were going to write about. They could have all sorts of kooky ideas elsewhere, but as long as the subject who ever it was was going to write about, was an agreement with their understanding, that was totally fine. And I think that that can be a very constructive thing to do as well, to kind of have that. We don't agree on everything, but we do agree on this. I think that's a healthy thing. Yeah, that's fundamentally what was behind both Manhattan Declaration and Evangelists and Catholics together. These are things we can all agree on. This does not mean we're endorsing everything that that everybody says about other subjects on these things we can agree. This brings up something though that requires a degree of intellectual, I guess, refinement, and that is the ability to kind of isolate these things and treat them as worth investing in, even though they are isolated matters. So sometimes you run across people who dismiss any kind of public or political action, because it doesn't bring the entire body of Christian thinking into it, if you get my drift. I run into that sometimes. And even with regard to say some of the recent debates concerning Christian nationalism, it's frustrating about it is just the fact that when you use that term, there are about 500 different things that come to mind. You're not actually talking about the same thing. Well, that raises an interesting point. And this is always something that comes when sometimes be careful what you wish for kind of thing is that in a lot of those discussions, there is also there is never really fully a clear explanation of what people mean. So they could mean different things and think they're on board or not. So clarification is important. But one of the things we see is sometimes a romanticized ideal that if we could just get a kind of Christian nationalism in place that will solve a lot of these kind of problems. And I think this is one of the places where history is a sober realism into that conversation. It's that we will start squabbling all over these little things often times. Who is representation of Christianity is going to be the national expression when you don't have the kind of consensus that usually are brand. And so I think there's something else you're talking about with ecumenism isn't kind of a political ideology that is going to become the one characteristic representation of what genuine article Christianity is. It's realizing that Christianity, its reality is like this. It has a lot of fragments and brokenness and yet in with and under that to borrow some Lutheran terminology is a one faith, one historic apostolic church that is the lifeblood of genuine faith and everyone who's come to know Christ. It is it's the root of that whether or not the articulations and our stance on that articulation is perfect. And so what we're saying is that we need to see things from our theological vision as Christians in both the broadest and the particular ways because those can be rich gifts to to our cultural witness and our way of bearing witness to Christ in the fullness of his reality, but also in and kind of re-evangelizing territory that once upon a time had had a stronger Christian understanding of things and we don't have to have all that unity perfectly harmonized as Chris said to benefit from those alliances, those deeper connections. Yeah if I can jump in I just the idea of of Christian nationalism on this front, you know, Chris's point or Tom's a Bonapier's which Christianity. Okay. Even even where historically we have seen a common faith more or less within a country where they set up a state church. It ends very badly. You know and even in England which had an official church but was tolerant of other religions, it has not ended well. And I don't think with that I mean this is a little bit off topic here but I'm not sure that people who advocate for at least some versions of Christian nationalism, you know, they're sort of like the people who advocate for communism. Well, it's never been done right before we'll get it right. Right. So yeah, it is interesting seeing some of the different versions. The Colson center we did another what we should say video basically what is Christian nationalism. And we get lots of questions of what is it? What is the definition? Because we didn't really answer the question because there isn't one definition and people keep coming back with that question. Well, what is the definition? Well, there's the definition. There's the the definition that critics of Christian nationalism might use and that's basically anytime anyone to the right of me, whoever I happen to be, does something political, brings the faith. Now someone to the left of me who does it that's okay. But some of the right of me that becomes a Christian nationalism thing. Then you've got kind of the general Christian nationalism thing of the very broad, just a Judeo Christian, a prioritization of Judeo Christianity within the public square. And then you've got the more specific ones like in Stephen Wolf's case for Christian nationalism where he's advocating a specifically reformed state. And I think that that's there's an analogy of that to lots of what we talk about when these ecumenism things, what isn't evangelical? That's the whole cottage injury industry in itself. And like defining that one of the reasons it's so hard to define evangelicalism is that there is no one definition to it. It's a consensus movement rather than something that has a center. John Suntreat, my gosh, he has said that there are evangelical churches, but there is no evangelical church. And I think there's a lot of wisdom in that because there's no consensus. And now there's no Billy Graham to kind of center it. There's no Carl Henry. There's a Christian today used to be a flagship of some of the ways, but it isn't. How can we talk about ecumenism between Catholics and Protestants and evangelicals or everyone who define all those things if we can't even define what even evangelical is? Yeah, the term evangelical covers everybody from John MacArthur to Joel O'Seen. Yes. Functionally, it's a worthless word at this point. And in some sense, the evangelical, the gospel is emphasized. You've seen threads of the emphasis. You talk about that as a court mark of the church. In some sense, so in one sense, there is kind of something that does unify all genuine article Christians, but on the other hand, evangelicals as a group starts to get very blurry the minute you start to define who's in, who's out at certain points. And it's one thing I do deal with a lot in Christian ethics and moral teaching. And this has been one of the frustrating points teaching evangelical ethics because on the whole, there has been there was kind of a long shared adoption of what the historic faith and what it left is a mark on, you know, formerly Christian cultures. There was kind of a genuine adoption of it. But as this secularism has taken root and technological advances and changes have happened, there's kind of like everyone, there's kind of a shell shock of how do we orient ourselves? And because we don't have something as Protestants or evangelicals, something similar to kind of Catholic social teaching, what the doctrine implies as the application of this, you start to get stuff all over the place. And even though people try to like, I think they did over davenant and so they try to put together, you know, Protestant social teaching, what they really are doing is just summing up the things that all the kind of magisterial or the second group of Protestant theologians kind of held in common that seemed to show that they all had at least enough family resemblances to look like a kind of shared commitment. But really if you press it, it wasn't aimed at that, it can't do it. You can't put a textbook together and say this is kind of Protestant social teaching. Because again, you have this lack of definition of what fully is Protestant different squabblings about it. And on the whole, it was the social teachings that usually held them together and sometimes do because they are historically Christian. But that's eroding. We're seeing with the neo evangelicals and the post evangelicals that kind of commitment to historic Christian ethics is loosening. So orienting ourselves is going to be a problem. Yeah, let me just tie into that a little bit and suggest something and I imagine you'll all agree with this stress at least as far as I could remember going back and thinking about my experience coming into the evangelical faith. The strong stress on personal experience. Almost at the expense of any kind of formal liturgical expression. So liturgy, if it was, say, explicit, wordy ordered for many evangelicals, struck them as formalism and consequently empty. Almost this, though, formality is empty, just by nature. And that consequently any expression of the Christian faith, including classic Protestantism, is somehow falling short of the genuine or the real deal, the ideal of the personal relationship with Jesus. So you can point back to a moment in time and say, like the Apostle Paul on Damascus Road, I had that experience. If you didn't have that, then you didn't have it. And I for that for a long time, that was what I thought of as sort of the binding force holding things together. But there's an awful lot of romanticism in that. There's an awful lot of kind of expressive individualism in that. There are a lot of other things. And then the problems that were experience, I mean, this is what the theological liberalism highlighted. It took experience centered relation, unmediated through any kind of sacramental vision or created order. The world disappears and it's you and God. So there's no, there's no ability to think culturally. There's no sort of interest in the arts. I mean, there's just all sorts of implications for this particular way of approaching things. Now, I think this is a has weakened a bit, you know, in the last few decades. But that was always kind of the thing that I thought kind of held together the Methodist and the Presbyterians because you had like low Presbyterians, low Methodists. Basically, they had the some of the trappings of those of those older classical forms of Christianity, but they were really kind of baptismistic or panochostalistic, in terms of how they lived and thought about worship and just the Christian life. I think that that's one of the reasons why you're seeing a move toward Orthodoxy right now, so many people that they're seeing in Orthodoxy, both something that has history and all of that. But also something that emphasized Zart and beauty and Jonathan Peugeot's symbolic world, all of those kinds of things are real strengths within that tradition that we have, you know, in the Protestant world and the Evangelical world have largely well given up. Yeah, it could be that there's kind of a presentistic element in a lot of Evangelicalism. I mean, you're talking about the personal sort of thing. I mean, one of Bedmond's quadrilateral, the conversionism, or as Doug Swinney talks about that Evangelicalism is classical Protestants Orthodoxies with an 18th century twist, referring to the revivals. There's so much of that intense personal thing. And that goes just so that when we talk about we can talk about the ecumenism between Evangelicals and Catholics, well, Evangelicalism is fundamentally an ecumenical movement. We don't think of it that way. We think it is almost culturally speaking. It's a very intolerant kind of thing, but trying to, we can all understand that there's such a thing as Evangelicalism, even if we have a hard time narrowing it down. And I think that some of it is that personal sort of thing. I'm trying, slowly working on a book for Lexi, I'm about Evangelicalism. And Mike, I'm like, trying to come up with one definition. There isn't one. There's multiple. You've got the theological, basically that's Beb-intendentswi, the theological elements, because you can have that, that that's something that a methodist, a believe in Methodist, a believe in Presbyterian, etc., etc. Here across the world will have the same understandings of the cross of Christi-Sentias activism, conversionism, etc., and the Soluscriptura, the doctrinal elements. Then there's kind of the socioeconomic or socio-political definition, and that's what most the world sees Evangelicals as being, as simply conservative white Americans. And that is how you get the oddity, another kind of quirky ecumenical thing. The New York Times refers to people talking about that Mormon Evangelicals, which is, okay, you can kind of get that, they have the same vocabulary, but Hindu Evangelicals, and Muslim Evangelicals. But I think that another element of Evangelicalism, this ecumenical thing that unites them all, is the almost liturgical element to Evangelicalism, which to go with a good illiteration there, an Evangelical service is sermon in song. It's very logisentric, it's very much interested in the preaching of the word, but also the congregational participatory singing, which is a very, you know, if that is done rightly, it's a very strong, it's very, the sermon is a good focus, keeping things on the word, both the word heard, you know, pronounced, proclaimed, but also the word understood, de-centering on those things, but also the personal element, the song, which is so, the singing, which is so common for Evangelicalism going back to some of the Moravian communities, the himnady of Evangelicalism. I think it's a very profound element, because it's a, it's embodied word. And I think that like not, not to be cutesy, but I think that the key thing, the Evangelicalism is the, is the eventual. It is, it is, it is, is logisentric, it's centered on the word in so many ways. And I think that that is the way we can have a constructive ecumenism, both within Evangelicalism, but also in a broader context. My youth later growing up, again, in Jotilberg, he said to students going off to college, his advice was, go find a church where people bring their Bibles. Now that's a lot more complicated now because this is people's Bibles now, their cell phones, stuff like that. But still, the point still stands, this is the early 90s, so if the people still actually have physical Bibles. But the point was that whatever disputes you may have with people who go to such a church, it's going to be determined by the word. And I think that that's not just something for Evangelicals, a key thing for Evangelicals. I think that that's the same sort of thing I was talking about earlier, my conversation with Roberto, we not only believe in the objectivity of truth, but we have a 90 something percent agreement on what the authority should be. Yes, he interpreted it through the magisterium and through the papacy and things like that, and I don't. But at least gives us a way to build those conversation, the objectivity of truth and the comprehensibility of truth. Yeah, this scripture as a primary source of all Christianity is the found, the apostolic witness that grounds it all becomes really if you look even in the academic world of people that cross denominations and traditions, they all are arguing to re-immersk themselves in the exegetical reading the way in which biblical reasoning happened with the church fathers, seeing how they came to it. Now, one of the things that is interesting, though, that kind of puts a little bit of, well, let me put it a different way. One of the things we're seeing also is that some of the ways in some of the strengths that came out of the retrieval of the logo centric emphasis and the word centeredness of Christian faith is that it's kind of how history took, kind of, gave it a shape. And in many ways, I think it's that shape that we're wrestling with now. It's like Chris was saying this kind of, it got filtered into something that wasn't its best expression. And I think, as you saw empiricism arises in which you can measure the kind of direct experience through kind of this, the alter call and whether or not the word is having this kind of empirical effect. And then a very individualist and certain things that could go could take it into directions that weren't kind of grounded in its best reality. And I think the historic reformers, this was part of what their strength, but also what happened to weaken it later was they brought this word centeredness. I think this is something that an evangelical or someone shaped or converted in that tradition doesn't want to give up even if they do look for a fuller container for. So that element has something, I think, to contribute to ecumenical discussions. And it has brought a lot of Catholics open to that ecumenical discussion and Orthodox to reading scripture again and going to scripture to find that core root of its faith. And I think that has been one of the pluses. The downside is that sometimes evangelicals haven't returned to the way the church has read scripture and the father's read scripture and learn that you can be word centered and don't have to become individualistic or modernist. It's one of the things that I find really interesting is that within the revivalist evangelical world, the alter-call has replaced communion as the center of the service. I don't like that. I like that. And that's the climax of the service. And the thing that's interesting is if you look back at the Presbyterians in Scotland particularly, I think, is well in the United States, they would have these quarterly, roughly, seasons of communion. And it would take, they would take, you know, there'd be all kinds of preaching, there'd be extra sermons, there'd be, you know, people would come together from different churches. They'd all assemble in one spot where they would have this this intent set of preaching and things like that. And a lot of ways it looks like what you see happening in tent meetings, except instead of centering it on an alter call, it was centered on communion. And you see conversions, you see all kinds of things happening at those. It's actually, it looks like a revival in a lot of ways, but it isn't. It isn't quite the same as what you see in revivalism because, like said, it's centered fundamentally on preparation to receive communion together with all of these different churches operating as one. One of the things that, you know, I'd like to take this into a slightly different direction. If we don't put the emphasis on, say, personal conversion stories, which, you know, I noted earlier, might have been what provided the common core to various kinds of evangelicals, whether we're talking about Baptist or Pentecostals or Presbyterians. And identify something else. You can have the same kind of dynamic. So I'm on the, I'm a senior editor, Touchstone magazine. And I'm the only reformed guy who is, you know, a senior editor there, there are Orthodox and Roman Catholic guys, Lutheran and Piscopalian and just, you know, Anglican and so forth should have said Anglican instead of Piscopalian because I don't think we have any Piscopalian. But anyway, what, what really provides kind of the thing that holds us all together, you know, we've got 12 senior editors and we have a slew of contributing editors, people like now in the, among the contributing editor, we have Peter Lighthart and Carl Truman. But, you know, when you have all those people, you know, in the same room, what makes it work? Well, I think there are actually a number of things to make it work. And one of those things is a common distaste for modernism and the in sort of the inroads of egalitarianism, particularly feminism into our various churches. And that provides a real sense of solidarity. One of the things that you're not allowed to support if you are an editor or a contributing editor at Touchstone is women's ordination. It's just not allowed. That's, that's grounds for saying goodbye. But what that does is, you know, what it does is it kind of gets me back to that earlier observation about, you know, being in a place like say Harvard or Oxford and you come across somebody who is actually a nice seen Christian Christian. He's a brother. So, we might be a Maldovian who goes to a church with icons painted on the outside. But, right. So these are battle hardened guys who have just been bloodied for like 20, 30, 40 years fighting, you know, sort of the, sort of the incursions of liberalism and their various traditions and it creates a kind of a spree to core that really holds it all together. And I do think, I do think tied to that, especially with Touchstone, but I think this is something else. We also see is also a shared longing to move away from some of the kind of immunism that has impacted all forms of Christianity to some extent, a hyper this worldliness. And the doctrines of the Trinity, the doctrines of the incarnation, which they all share, they're the core and center. Are such that they do communicate properly something of transcendence that I think is filling that hunger for people that are sick of these modernist variations and hijacking of I think a full Christian vision. And so I think that those central doctrines, you talk about what is going to be the thing that holds it together. I mean, I think the thing that has always held it together is is it centering in Christ, Christology and Christology centering in the Trinitarian context. And you can find from evangelicals like Fred Sanders and all these young theologians just as much good writing an immersion in the doctrines of Trinity and incarnation and their implications for creation and our life with God that are bringing about a much stronger consensus across the board ecumenically, but also allowing the distinct variations of each tradition to bring its contributing distinction. And you can look now at the Oxford handbooks and theology, which are oftentimes very from all people committed to the faith. You're not getting these written by liberalism or kind of post-modern faith. And yet you will see each of them friends contributing from their distinct tradition how this doctrine plays its play out, strength weaknesses, its engagement with others. So I think these kind of things are very healthy alternatives. And thank God because we are wrestling with the one historic faith together and trying to draw on its riches to engage the deep challenges we all face as Christians today. Yeah, I think that that's that split of understanding of between people who actually believe what they believe and people who are kind of making it up. That's a key distinction. Remember in Ted's, I think it was a book by John Woodward or edited by John Woodward. He's edited like 10,000 books I think. But he always loved his lectures because he had the most amazing stories. He marched in Red Square. It's just amazing. But one of the books he edited I think was doing theology in today's world. And I think it encapsulates a lot of what we're getting at here because it had a reform person, Wesleyan person and a Baptist and so on and so on and so on. And all of these people they had the resources they engaged with. I mean, the reform guy of course being reformed had like 50 or 60 footnotes, right? Because they're all like, Eddie, there's a reason there's all these books here, right? And there was the others had lots of them as well. They're engaging with comment having conversations with one another. They're engaging with the tax they're engaging with theologians. The person representing the liberal theologians, however, I forgot who it was, had 10 footnotes, six of which were to himself. I think that that catches the difference here is because when we talk about modernism or postmodernism stuff, it's a self-entailed conversation. It's like the difference between, I remember what I was looking for, you know, happily, am I the Colson Center now for eight years now, but I was looking for jobs. I knew not to look up to bother with jobs. It said a professor of religion. Yes. Professor theology, yes, but professor of religion, no, because religion for in the academic context meant the human expression of spirituality, whereas the hour demand a study of God, well, literally it means that, but it also should have a great difference. And I think that again, that can be a groundwork for constructive ecumenism because we're dealing with a reality, not dealing with our own imaginations. And as so long as we think of it, nearly as our self-expression, that me as a Presbyterian, so-and-so as an Anglican, so-and-so as a Roman Catholic, and so on, we're just talking to ourselves even if it's in conversation without this podcast, not the podcast, but kind of well, yes, some of the podcast, the YouTube thing, the thing the Glenn you were talking about, where it's always the, you know, what Protestants hate this book or Catholics hate this book, they're self-referential conversations. They're not actually engaging with one another, but not dealing with any reality beyond themselves. And that's why they fail. Yeah, I think that's a good place to wrap things up because we've gotten to actually to kind of the, our time limit, as well as a kind of good statement to end on. Anything that you want to add, Glenn, before we wrap up? We will put in links in the show notes to breakpoint to the Colson Center to some of the things that Tim has talked about here, but I've worked with him for years now through the Colson Center, and I've always enjoyed him, and I'm rather embarrassed that I didn't think to bring them on sooner. Well, it's been good to have you Tim. Thanks for coming on. We really appreciate it. Great. And if you, a cast listener, have enjoyed the show, and you'd like to find out how to support us on an ongoing basis, there is a link in the show notes to our Patreon page. All right, thanks a lot, and bye-bye. Theology Podcast is a ministry of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Battleground, Washington. The Theology Podcast is produced and edited by a widely craft productions of Nashville, Tennessee.